Bosnia is now coming back to haunt the Clintons, and so it should. Though both America, and the Clintons, are loved in Bosnia for finally forcing intervention after the Srebrenica massacre of 2005, the whole Tuzla Tale media outrage has made me revisit my feelings about the Clintons and American foreign policy in the 1990s

Let me be totally frank. In the end it took the US to silence the Serb guns which had encircled the civilian populations of Bosnia for three years. For Europeans of my generation, the final and effective use of US military power totally changed our mindset about US foreign policy. Through the post Vietnam years, especially in Latin America, myself and fellow left wingers had seen American power as mainly pernicious. Bosnia changed all that. We finally saw the use of military force for humanitarian reasons. The US showed Europeans how ineffective they were at policing their own continent.

This new belief in liberal intervention spurred the actions to defend the Albanian majority in Kosovo, and eventually brought down Slobodon Milosevic and his wild genocidal nationalism. It obviously went completely awry in Iraq, but that's another matter.

What matters here is that Hillary's 'misspeaking' about Tuzla - her reckless embellishment of her own heroics, her misuse of personal danger, show shocking disrepect to the 200,000 people, mainly civilians caught in real sniper fire and mortar attack, who died in the biggest conflict in Europe since world war II.

Iraq has a similiar number of casualties (by educated guess) but it's population (20 million) is five times as big as Bosnia.

As a European deeply involved in the Yugoslav wars of the 90s, her fib is much more audacious and repellent than anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said.

It makes me realise how complicit the Clinton's were in dragging their feet and intervening to save Bosnians as the genocide began. Check out Roger Cohen's brilliant devastating critique of the Clinton's in the New York Times yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/opinio n/27Cohen.html

Cohen is a brave and gifted journalist, probably one of the best to cover the former Yugoslav wars, and wrote a heart rending book - Hearts Grown Brutal - about it.

Given the shameless disregard for history and foreign affairs Hillary and her advisors have shown over this tragic war, I am amazed that no-one has resigned.

Ironically, one of the other great journalists to cover the war, and to pen a Pulitzer Prize winning book about Genocide as a result of it, is Samantha Power.

Power had to resign for describing Hillary, off the record, as a monster.

Given the real monstrosity of what happened in Bosnia, and Hillary's cavalier disregard for that, can we please have Samantha Power back?

Update [2008-3-31 16:11:10 by brit]: Having heard Clinton supporters aver that Hillary was pushing for intervention, when she was doing the reverse, her lie seems all the more egregious and shameful. It's not only valour theft, but victim theft

Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:

"Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people."

I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care "initiative."

It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.